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Abstract:
The open access movement in legal scholarship, inasmuch as it is driven within the law library community over concerns about the rising cost of legal information, fails to address - and in fact diverts resources from - the real problem facing law libraries today: the soaring costs of nonscholarly, commercially published, practitioner-oriented legal publications. The current system of legal scholarly publishing - in student-edited journals and without meaningful peer review - does not face the pressures to increase prices common in the science and health disciplines. One solution to this problem is for law schools to redirect some of their resources - intellectual capital, reputation, and student labor - to publishing legal information for practitioners rather than legal scholars.

open access, legal information, legal scholarship, law journals, libraries

Abstract:
Academic law librarians have long insisted on the value of autonomy from the university library system, usually basing their arguments on strict adherence to ABA standards. However, law librarians have failed to construct an explicit and consistent definition of autonomy. Lacking such a definition, they have tended to rely on an outmoded Langdellian view of the law as a closed system. This view has long been discredited, as approaches such as law and economics and sociolegal research have become mainstream, and courts increasingly resort to nonlegal sources of information. Blind attachment to autonomy as a goal rather than a means no longer serves the law library's users, and that continued insistence on total law library autonomy may have the effect of seriously compromising the quality of law library service to legal education and scholarship. Fundamental changes in the nature of legal scholarship, the increasingly digital information environment, and the economics of information mean that cooperative and collaborative relationships among law libraries, university libraries, and other information providers will be just as important as autonomy, and should be recognized as such in law library planning and in the ABA standards for law school accreditation. Continued insistence on total autonomy risks a failure to meet all the information needs of the academic legal community.

law libraries, legal information, legal research, legal education, autonomous discipline

Abstract:
In March 2005 a fire at the University at Buffalo Law School cased extensive soot and smoke damage to the Law Library and its collections. While the library literature is full of articles and books on disaster preparedness, from evacuation of staff and users to salvaging books and equipment, little guidance is available, however, on dealing with management issues such as staff morale and user frustration. If handled successfully, the inevitable disruption can provide opportunities for staff growth. Attention to issues of morale and staff cohesiveness is essential to providing the level of service that law library users expect.

law library, disaster planning, law school, law students